It's hard to imagine The Fall and Joy Division coming from anywhere other than 1970s Manchester. Something about the city's gloom and decay seemed to seep deep into the fabric of their very different sounds. Although he didn't identify the place by name, The Fall's singer Mark E. Smith immortalized the pollution-belching Trafford Park on "Industrial Estate", an early classic of the band. "The crap in the air will fuck up your face", he jeers.
"That song is a very funny take on Manchester's history of having been the cradle of capitalism and then, by the 1970s, its grave", says Richard Boon, who funded the recording of The Fall's first EP but then couldn't afford to release it on his label New Hormones.
The Fall - Industrial Estate 1978
"This is the three "R"'s...Repetition repetition repetition", quipped Smith on The Fall's mission statement "Repetition". Scorning "fancy music" - the overproduced mainstream rock of the day - "Repetition" fulfilled Smith's early goal of "raw music with really weird vocals on top". The rawness was supplied by guitarist Martin Bramah's thin, wheedling guitar lines, keyboardist Una Baines' wonky organ jabs (played on the cheap 'n' nasty Snoopy keyboard, rated by Sounds as the absolute worst on the market), Tony Friel's capering bass, and Karl Burns' ramshackle drums. The freak vocal element came from Smith's half-sung, half-spoken drawl and wizened insolence.
The Fall - Repetition 1978
On Live at the Witch Trials, the group's 1979 debut, "Underground Medecin" and "Frightened" evoke the positive and negative sides of amphetamine abuse: the rush that lights up your nervous system ("I found a reason not to die", Smith exults, "the spark inside") versus the hyper-tense twitchiness of stimulant-induced paranoia.
The Fall - Underground Medecin 1979
The Fall - Frightened 1979
In 1981 Smith talked about the downside of "taking a lot of speed" over a long period: "you start looking in mirrors and getting ulcers". But The Fall carried on writing songs like "Totally wired" and covering sixties amphetamine hymns like "Mr Pharmacist".
The Fall - Totally Wired 1980
The Fall - Mr Pharmacist 1986
The "pharmacist" in that song is a drug dealer, a street punk peddling "energy". The Fall were obsessed with the double standards surrounding drugs - the way some chemicals are proscribed while others are prescribed. Training as a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital, Baines came back every day from work and disgorged stories about the mistreatment and neglect she'd witnessed - including the use of downers to pacify the inmates.
Her talk filtered into Smith's lyrics: "Repetition" refers to electro-shock therapy (after you've had some, alleges Smith, you lose your love of repetition), while The Fall's 1979 single "Rowche Rumble" got its title from Hoffman La Roche, the pharmaceutical multinational who dominated the market for antidepressants.
The Fall - Rowche Rumble 1979
Pills feature in Bingo-Master's Break-out", the title track of The Fall's debut EP, not as a way of coping with soul-crushing mundanity but of escaping it permanently. A guy whose job is organizing other people's recreation - the bingo master - looks into his future and, seeing only encroaching baldness and years "wasting time in numbers and rhyme", opts to end his life with a handful of pills washed down with booze.
Macabre and hilarious, "Bingo-Master's Break-out" typified The Fall's peculiar brand of social surrealism.
The Fall - Bingo-Master's Break-out 1978
Equally important as subject matter was rock culture. Song after song skewered the platitudes and pieties of hipsters: "It's the New Thing", "Music Scene", "Mere Pseud Mag Ed", "Look Know", "Printhead" (the last about an obsessive music-press reader who gets 'dirty fingers' every week perusing the 'inkies').
The Fall - It's the New Thing 1978
The Fall - Music Scene 1979
The Fall - Mere Pseud Mag Ed 1982
The Fall - Look Know 1982
The Fall - Printhead 1979
One of Smith's most famous pronouncements was his description of The Fall themselves as 'Northern white crap that talks back' (in "Crap Rap 2" from Witch Trials).
The Fall - Crap Rap 2 / Like to Blow 1979
"Fiery Jack", the Fall's fourth single, offered a coruscating portrait of one of Manchester's finest sons, the hard-bitten product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart, who's spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible - a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might just be another of Jack's poisons, judging by his refusal to go 'back to the slow life' and lines like 'Too fast to write/I just burn burn burn'. Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was 'the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years', he told Sounds.
The Fall - Fiery Jack 1980
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